Twenty Years

Twenty years ago today, I had been married just about 9 months to Beast.
We were living in a minuscule apartment in a building built about 1910 (read: no closets to speak of) with 11 other apartments in it; I don't think we'd been hired as managers yet.
I was in library school, working on my Master's degree, in my second semester.
Beast was in his first year of full-time employment at The Tape Place, where he was earning the astounding salary of $28,000 per year.
We owned a 1978-ish Ford Pinto, which we parked a block away from the apartment building in a city lot because our building had no parking lot.
No A/C, carpet that smelled of cat pee in hot weather, a kitchen with no counters (none), and a loudly snoring next-door neighbor....we were directly across from a gas station/mini-mart, cattywampus from a delicious Chinese restaurant, and our dining room view--our only view, really--was of the back of a funeral home. In the summer, with all of the windows wide open for air, we had to suspend phone conversations as the city bus went by on the other side of the building.
We were both twenty-three-and-a-half. Sometime that year, I calmly got up one morning and threw up and we both wondered if I was pregnant. I wasn't.

The week before Easter, my dad and mom arrived for a visit. They stayed with my sister Ellen and her family about 45 minutes north of us in Quaint-Beyond-Words Town, an exurb of the city we were living three blocks north of; technically, we were in a suburb, really though we were in the city.

On that Thursday, Maundy Thursday, I was "working on a project" with Martha S. and Anne G. in the big workroom in the SLIS department; in reality, we were sort of messing around. Beast appeared at one of the doors, out of breath, tense. "I've been looking all over for you. We need to go. Now. Your dad's in the hospital." Huh? [The days before cell phones, email, and IMs....remember?]

Yes, Dad was in the hospital. Actually, he'd been at two hospitals that day: Ellen had taken him to St. Mike's--the nearest hospital (at 40 minutes from home, that's "near"??)--where the medical staff decided he needed more specific help than they could provide and transferred him by screaming ambulance to St. Mary's, about 20 minutes south of my campus.

I remember being stunned, looking at Beast in confusion, probably with the remains of a laugh draining out of my eyes. I don't actually remember packing my things, getting to the car, driving to the hospital, parking...but I do remember stepping off the elevator on the surgical floor just as my dad was wheeled past on a gurney. The nurses stopped long enough for me to say hi (goodbye?) and then they whisked him (that's just how it sounded too: "whisk" down the hall through the double doors and out of sight) into emergency heart surgery. He had, They had decided, suffered his third heart attack at some point in the past couple of days, and the arteries in his heart were occluded enough that if they didn't open him up N-O-W, he wouldn't make it to morning.

Ellen, Beast, Mom and I spent the next 6 or 7 hours on the plastic seats in the surgical waiting area. The nurses came out every few hours to update us, sounding cautious. Ellen was in the midst of a terrific head cold and was medicated for that, which I've always hoped accounted for the fact that she kept telling us Dad was going to die. Like clockwork, every half hour or so, she'd start crying and repeating that mantra. Then she'd drop back onto the sofa and sleep for another 20 minutes or so. Repeat ad nauseum. There was only one window in the waiting room, overlooking the parking lot. I don't know what we did for all those hours, besides try not to strangle Ellen. We must have talked. I don't know.

The surgeon appeared at some point, telling us that Dad had pulled through "so far" and we could see him in awhile "briefly." He had loads of details, but I don't remember how much or anything specific, just that Dad was alive, and that it was Good Friday, and that Ellen had been wrong.

Five years earlier, Dad had had his first heart surgery. This was number two. There would be no chance for a third--no veins left in his legs to be cut down and built into new heart suppliers.

Mom and Dad ended up staying at Ellen and Dean's for about a month while Dad recovered. He was released from the hospital by the Monday after Easter, we had our "Easter dinner" the following Sunday, and Dad got to see his grandson Don play some baseball games. Was that the spring that he also got to see Don take a fly ball in the eye, nearly breaking the orbital bone? I can't remember.

Dad was cleared to fly home, and he got back on the cardiac diet-and-exercise regimen. I graduated with a Master's (and a part-time job in a nearby library) in December.